Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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The human species is forever in a state of change, forever becoming.
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When Goya was 80 he drew an ancient man propped on two sticks, with a great mass of white hair and beard all over his face, and the inscription, "I am still learning."
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I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.
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I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way.
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Let women be provided with living strength of their own. Let them have the means to attack the world and wrest from it their own subsistence, and their dependence will be abolished -- that of man also.
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You can't define the future. And in my opinion, you can't define the avant-garde.
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It is true that nothing is gained without something being lost: everyone knows that in fulfilling oneself one necessarily sacrifices some possibilities.
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The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.
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Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, "I don't want to be just another blade of grass."
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To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.
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It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.
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Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive.
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The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence.
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Ce n'est gue' re que dans les asiles que les coquettes gardent avec ente" tement une foi entie' re en des regards absents; normalement, elles re clament des te moins. Women fond of dress are hardly ever entirely satisfied not to be seen, except among the insane; usually they want witnesses.
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If the unconscious must express itself it will do so through the work that you do consciously or subconsciously, with words, with what you have to say.
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The writer can't stop her unconscious from showing up, that's certain.
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The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.
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I think there is a great tendency toward autobiography among women today. It is perhaps facile - and I say that even though I have written one myself.
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The misfortune is that although everyone must come to death, each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.
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Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear, without having so much as a smile for the young future.
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Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.
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Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
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To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue nonetheless to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other...when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the 'division' of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.
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I have never read a really good novel written by a man where women are portrayed as they truly are. They can be portrayed externally very well - Stendhal's Madame de Renal, for example - but only as seen from the outside.